As misleading headlines go, this Express headline has to be one of the worst. The figures show almost the exact opposite, so how did the Express get it so wrong? To be fair to the Express, the “shocking new study” they refer to in the subheading was a study released by the Centre for Social Justice, which also had the headline:
27 YOUNG NON-EU MIGRANTS HIRED FOR EVERY YOUNG BRIT SINCE 2020, ANALYSIS REVEALS.
Maybe the Express can be excused for simply repeating it?
So why is that statement so wildly misleading?
The Study
The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), classified by Wikipedia as a centre-right think tank, was founded by Iain Duncan Smith and Tim Montgomerie in 2004. Looking over some of its earlier work, it appears to have been reasonably sensible back in the day, but this study is shockingly bad.
This was their method:
Between January 2020 and December 2025, non-EU under-25 payrolled employment increased from 81,500 to 370,900, a rise of 289,400 or 355 per cent. UK-national under-25 payrolled employments increased from 3,841,500 to 3,852,300, a rise of 10,800.
They compared the difference in UK nationals in the 16-24 age bracket in payrolled work at the start and end of a 6-year period with the difference in non-EU nationals in that age bracket.
They then divided the INCREASE in non-EU nationals by the INCREASE in UK nationals and found it was 27 times larger.
And claimed this meant that 27 non-EU migrants were HIRED for every UK national.
For this to be true:
- Every 16-24-year-old with a job in January 2020 must have remained in that job for 6 years
- None of them can have aged beyond 25 over that 6-year period
To state the blindingly obvious, if you have a group with an 8-year age range, and you look at changes over 6 years, most of the people in the group will have moved into the next age bracket, and been replaced by new, younger ones.
The report claims that only the ADDITIONAL 10,800 over that time frame had “been hired” within the 6 years.
Which is obviously complete nonsense.
The vast majority of that group will have been hired during this time frame by virtue of becoming old enough to enter that age group. Not to mention the general turnover of jobs people have at that stage of life, but the data doesn’t look at hirings. It only looks at the number of people in payrolled employment in any given month,
Demographics
Anyone who was 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 or 24 in January 2020 will have moved to the 25-34 bracket by December 2025
Only the 16, 17 and 18-year-olds from 2020 would still be in there.
82.3 per cent of 16-18 year-olds were in education or apprenticeships in 2020, so any jobs they acquired by December 2025 will almost certainly be as new hires.
So I think we can safely assume the vast, vast majority of under-25s in employment by Dec 2025, regardless of nationality, will have been hired since 2020.
The numbers
So what do the numbers actually show?
Here is the HMRC data that was used in the CSJ study:
3.85 million UK under-25s in paid employment in Dec 2025 compared to 0.37 million non-EU nationals.
So there were actually 10 times as many UK under-25s in paid employment as there were non-EU under-25s.
The overwhelming majority of whom were hired after Jan 2020.
So not “27 non-EU migrants hired for every Brit”, but in fact “10 Brits hired for every non-EU migrant”
That stat’s not going to make any headlines, though!
Brexit
I believe there is a reason why, despite the HMRC data set starting in 2014, this study chose to look only at non-EU migrants from 2020 onwards.
Here is the full data set
Despite all the fluctuations in immigration over the last decade, the ratio of UK to non-UK nationals, under 25, in work, has remained largely unchanged
If you zoom into the ~10% non-UK section, you can see what has changed:
After the 2016 Brexit vote, EU nationals started to “go back where they came from”, and a new points-based immigration system was introduced in 2020 to bring in non-EU nationals to come and support the industries which had lost many EU migrant workers.
So now, if we look at the 2020-2025 time frame and include EU nationals, you can see that about 2/3 of the non-EU figure is simply replacing the EU nationals who were here before 2020.
NEETs
The number of young people Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET) has been in the headlines recently, with a new report out last week looking at the one million young people who fall into this category.
This CSJ report, being released at the same time, has allowed for a conflation of the issues of youth unemployment and immigrant workers.
Young people not being in work or education is a problem that needs tackling, but the NEET report looked at immigration and found:
This review does not find evidence that migration is a primary driver of rising NEET levels. The main forces identified in this chapter lie elsewhere: weaker entry routes, a harder transition into work, and a labour market that has become less effective at bringing young people in.
But the relationship between migration and youth employment is not straightforward. The effect depends on how employers recruit, how labour demand adjusts, and whether changes in migration alter the number, quality and conditions of jobs on offer. The current evidence does not support a simple displacement story.
Neither the CSJ study nor the NEET report backs up that assertion made in the Express subheading: “immigration is fuelling mass unemployment among under-25s”
But why let facts get in the way when you can write newspaper headlines that include the phrases ‘mass unemployment’ among young people and ‘foreign workers’
And while the press coverage is frustrating, they are only repeating, albeit unquestioningly, what the CSJ put out. And I am genuinely shocked by how statistically illiterate the CSJ report is. I normally have to dig a bit deeper to work out when stats have been misused!
But this doesn’t pass even the most rudimentary sniff test.
How did no one at the think-tank ask: “How likely is it that only 10,800 young Britons were offered a job in a 6-year period vs 289,400 non-EU nationals?” for that 27:1 stat to be correct?
Or maybe they did. We’ll never know.
But these kinds of specific numbers stick.
Millions of people are all over social media repeating the “fact” that 27 foreigners were hired for every 1 young Brit. All the talk shows are discussing it.
Just like the claim that “small boat migrants were 24 times more likely to be in prison”, which was horribly misleading (debunk here!).
There is something about a big and very specific number that just cements itself in people’s minds.
Unfortunately, it is not always enough to note that a headline figure comes from an official-sounding study or report, and determine that it must therefore be accurate.
If it sounds like a big number that’s designed to make you angry, always take a slightly longer look at where it came from and what they did to get there.
This article was first published on Emma’s excellent Substack. Thank you to everyone who supports Emma by reading, subscribing and sharing her work. As she points out,
“I can’t tackle the tsunami of misinformation out there on my own. You guys sharing my work, or just using it to inform your side of any argument with friends and relatives, makes a difference as we all try to chip away!”
If you are going to be in and around Buckingham on the 20th June, Emma will be delivering a workshop at the Buckingham Literary Festival – The Misinformation Lab: Reading Between the Lies. It would be great to see you there!
